Mitchell Green

First lucidly formulated by Gottlob Frege, the distinction between illocutionary force and semantic content has been largely accepted by philosophers of language and linguists for much of the last century. In recent years it has come under attack. This essay aims to address the cogency of that challenge, by, first, clarifying the phenomena that the force/content distinction is designed to explain, and by providing a refinement of that distinction on which contents are not necessarily propositional, and on which force is an aspect of speakermeaning, but not (except in unusual cases) an aspect of what is said. Second, direct attacks offered by Hanks and by Barker and Popa-Wyatt are then assessed and shown to be unsuccessful against the force/content distinction thus refined. Third, an indirect challenge, which attempts to account for the relevant phenomena while abjuring any force/content distinction, is considered and shown to be untenable.

We first correct some errors in Lepore and Stone’s discussion of speaker meaning and its relation to linguistic meaning. With a proper understanding of those notions and their relation, we may then motivate a liberalization of speaker meaning that includes overtly showing one’s psychological state. I then distinguish this notion from that of expression, which, although communicative, is less cognitively demanding than speaker meaning since it need not be overt. This perspective in turn enables us to address Lepore and Stone’s broadly Davidsonian view of figurative language, which rightly emphasizes the role of imagination and perspective-taking associated with such language, but mistakenly suggests it is sui generis relative to other types of pragmatic process, and beyond the realm of communication. Figurative utterances may influence conversational common ground, and may be assessed for their aptness; they also have a characteristically expressive role that a Davidsonian view lacks the resources to explain.

Much literature portrays characters in the often-complex processes of negotiating moral obstacles. Some of these processes, as this chapter makes clear, make these characters better persons; others make them worse. As conceptually engaged readers, we can learn from these characters’ successes and failures in ways that affect us not just cognitively but also ethically. Because such learning is made possible by the fact that certain literary works _show_ us how to be good (or bad), literature can contribute to moral development or degeneracy in its readers. This chapter proceeds by developing an account of how it is possible to gain knowledge from a work of fiction; by employing some tools from the pragmatic theory of conversation; and by closely examining two literary case studies that develop a conception of empathy as successfully imagining how another feels, Charlotte Brontë’s _Jane Eyre_ and Joyce Carol Oates’ _Zombie_.

This brief, elegant book introduces students and general readers to philosophy through core questions and topics--particularly those involving ethics, the existence of God, free will, the relation of mind and body, and what it is to be a person. It also features a chapter on reasoning, both theoretical and practical, that develops an account of both cogent logical reasoning and rational decision-making. Throughout, the emphasis is on initiating newcomers to philosophy through rigorous yet lively consideration of some of the most fundamental questions a thinking person can ask.

This essay develops a notion of meaning—what I shall term organic meaning--that may serve as a bridge between Grice’s notions of natural and non-natural meaning. It is a bridge in the sense that like non-natural meaning and unlike natural meaning, it includes cases of communication; yet like natural meaning and unlike non-natural meaning, it is not cognitively demanding, in that a creature can exhibit organic meaning without intending to do so and without intending to produce any effects on the cognitive states of others. As a result, organic meaning may be of interest as part of an evolutionarily plausible account of the phylogeny of communication and of a psychologically credible account of the ontogeny of communication. It will also shed light on aspects of adult human communication that do not meet the cognitive demands of speaker meaning. The approach uses tools from evolutionary game theory, including that of an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) and is inspired and informed by findings in the evolutionary biology of communication.

This introduction provides an overview of William Lycan’s contributions to philosophy, with a particular focus on his work in the philosophy of mind, language, and method. Lycan has been a major figure in contemporary philosophy, defending materialist and functionalist views of the mind, while also engaging with issues such as representationalism, perception, and epistemology. His work on language has significantly shaped debates on truth-conditional semantics, reference, and natural-kind terms. Furthermore, Lycan has contributed to metaphilosophy, especially concerning the nature and progress of philosophical inquiry. The volume is structured into three sections—Mind, Meaning, and Method—each of which reflects key themes in Lycan’s thought. The contributions explore topics such as olfactory representation, the epistemic role of intuitions, and the philosophy of conditionals. By examining Lycan’s work from multiple angles, this volume aims to provide a deeper understanding of his influence and the ongoing relevance of his ideas in contemporary debates.

The relation between two systems of attitude ascription that capture all the empirically significant aspects of an agent's thought and speech may be analogous to that between two systems of magnitude ascription that are equivalent relative to a transformation of scale. If so, just as an object's weighing eight pounds doesn't relate that object to the number 8 (for a different but equally good scale would use a different number), similarly an agent's believing that P needn't relate her to P (for a different but equally adequate interpretive scheme could use a different proposition). In either case the only reality picked out by any system of ascription is what is common to all equivalent rivals. By emphasizing some contrasts between decision theory and belief-desire psychology, it is argued here that if attitude ascription is appropriately analogous to measurement, then not only is being related to a proposition an artifact of the system of representation chosen, but so are belief and desire.

I here examine some of the main contentions of Todd's “The Open Future”. I argue first that a future contingent need not contain locutions such as “will” or cognates and that once this is recognized a trilemma emerges for Todd, putting pressure on him to relinquish one of the book's main aims. Then after noting (Section II) Todd's response to a puzzle A.N. prior had raised for betting on an open-future style view, I turn (Sections IIIa and IIIb) to his discussion of whether his approach is committed to demanding that ordinary speakers reform their talk about the future. I conclude (Section IV) that the objective of the replacement strategy that Todd recommends could be achieved with less violence to ordinary linguistic practices with the help of a view on which “will” and cognates are polysemous.

William Lycan is an internationally renowned American philosopher whose work since the late 1960s has been not only extensive but also influential, particularly in the areas of philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and more recently metaphilosophy. This contributed volume features high-quality contributions by prominent or up-and-coming philosophers who critically examine many aspects of Lycan’s work; it also contains an essay by Lycan responding to these contributions. In this way, not only is the importance of William Lycan’s work appreciated, it is also made accessible for further research. The book is also suitable for teaching purposes at universities.

In articles such as “Speech Acts without Propositions?” (2006), Marina Sbisà advocates a “strong” conception of speech acts as means by which speakers modify their own and others’ deontic statuses, including their rights, obligations, and commitments. On this basis Sbisà challenges an influential approach to speech acts as typically if not universally possessing propositional contents. Sbisà argues that such an approach leads to viewing speech acts as primarily aimed at communicating propositional attitudes rather than carrying out socially and normatively significant action. For this reason she advocates eschewing propositions from speech act theory’s conceptual toolkit; she also proposes a liberalization of the distinction between illocutionary force and semantic content, which are widely thought to be mutually exclusive. In this chapter we examine Sbisà’s reasoning and argue that while it does justify denying propositional attitudes a central role in communication, it does not justify dispensing with propositions or other contents in our theorizing about speech acts. In addition, we endorse Sbisà’s proposal for liberalizing the force/content distinction, and show a variety of ways in which force indicators may also possess semantic content.

This chapter examines Davidson's treatment of emotions as complexly bound up with cognitive states such as belief, rather than as being essentially opposed to such states. Emotions on Davidson's view can be justified, and can be both causes of and reasons for action. We also consider Davidson's elucidation and defense of David Hume's analysis of pride and similar affective states. Objections to that elucidation and defense are discussed, and it is explained how Davidson could rebut those objections. Davidson's theory is then discussed in light of unconscious emotions, irrational emotions, and the possibility of nonhuman animals possessing emotions.

After briefly laying out a cultural-evolutionary approach to speech acts (Sects. 1–2), I argue that the notion of commitment at play in assertion and related speech acts comprises multiple dimensions (Sect. 3). Distinguishing such dimensions enables us to hypothesize evolutionary precursors to the modern practice of assertion, and facilitates a new way of posing the question whether, and if so to what extent, speech acts are conventional (Sect. 4). Our perspective also equips us to consider how a modern speaker might employ an illocutionary analogue of A.N. Prior’s “runabout-inference ticket”, in which the pragmatic “introduction rules” for utterances correspond to evolutionary precursors of modern speech acts, but in which the “elimination rules” correspond to their modern descendants (Sect. 5). Such behavior would be abusive, though not in a way readily discernible without an evolutionary perspective on speech acts that attends to the dimensions of commitment that they encompass. Such behavior also raises the question how we may safeguard against it in public discourse, and I close (Sect. 6) with some suggestions for doing so.

We critically survey prominent recent scholarship on the question of whether fiction can be a source of epistemic value for those who engage with it fully and appropriately. Such epistemic value might take the form of knowledge (for ‘cognitivists’) or understanding (for ‘neo-cognitivists’). Both camps may be sorted according to a further distinction between views explaining fiction’s epistemic value either in terms of the author’s engaging in a form of telling, or instead via their showing some state of affairs to obtain, a special case of which is the provision of self-knowledge. Fictional works that show rather than tell often employ thought experiments. The epistemic value of some fictional works is indicated by their enabling of empathy, itself illuminated via the psychological process of experience-taking. Whether a fictional work offers epistemic value by telling or showing, there is, in principle, no bar to its being able to deliver on what it offers, and consumers of fiction who exercise epistemic vigilance may gain either knowledge or some degree of understanding from their engagement with it.

This essay addresses the question whether artificial speakers can perform speech acts in the technical sense of that term common in the philosophy of language. We here argue that under certain conditions artificial speakers can perform speech acts so understood. After explaining some of the issues at stake in these questions, we elucidate a relatively uncontroversial way in which machines can communicate, namely through what we call verbal signaling. But verbal signaling is not sufficient for the performance of a speech act. To explain the difference, we elucidate the notion of a speech act developed by Austin in the mid-twentieth century and then discuss Strawson’s influential proposal for how that notion may be related to Grice’s conception of speaker meaning. We then refine Strawson’s synthesis in light of Armstrong’s reconceptualization of speaker meaning in terms of objectives rather than intentions. We next extend this conception of speech acts to the cases of recorded, proxy, and conditional speech acts. On this basis, we propose that a characteristic role for artificial speakers is as proxies in the performance of speech acts on behalf of their human creators. We also consider two objections to our position, and compare our approach with others: while other authors appeal to notions such as “quasi-assertion,” we offer a sharp characterization of what artificial speakers can do that does not impute intentions or similarly controversial powers to them. We conclude by raising doubts that our strategy can be applied to speech acts generally.

In a series of articles (Pagin, 2004, 2009), Peter Pagin has argued that assertion is not a social speech act, introducing a method (which we baptize ‘the P-test’) designed to refute any account that defines assertion in terms of its social effects. This paper contends that Pagin's method fails to rebut the thesis that assertion is social. We show that the P-test is both unreliable (because it overgenerates counterexamples) and counterproductive (because it ultimately provides evidence in favor of some social accounts). Nonetheless, we contend that assertion is not fully social. We defend an intermediate view according to which assertion is only a partly social speech act: assertions both commit the speaker to a proposition (a social component) and present their propositional content as true (a non-social component). The upshot is that assertion is in some important respect social, although it cannot be defined solely in terms of its social effects.

This essay ties together some main strands of the author’s research spanning the last quarter-century. Because of its broad scope and space limitations, he prescinds from detailed arguments and instead intuitively motivates the general points which are supported more fully in other publications to which he provides references. After an initial delineation of several distinct notions of meaning, the author considers such a notion deriving from the evolutionary biology of communication that he terms ‘organic meaning’, and places it in the context of evolutionary game theory. That provides a framework for a special type of organic meaning found in the phenomenon of expression, of which the author here offers an updated characterization while highlighting its wide philosophical interest. Expression in turn generalizes to a paradigmatic form of human communication—conversation—and section 4 provides a taxonomy of conversation-types while arguing that attention to such types helps to sharpen predictions of what speakers say rather than conversationally implicate. We close with a view of fictional discourse on which authors of fictional works are engaged in conversation with their readers, and can provide them with knowledge in spite of the fictional character of their conversation. Such knowledge includes knowledge of how an emotion feels and is thus a route to empathy.

1. On at least one usage of ‘mean’, performing an action that leads someone else to think that P, is not, on its own, sufficient for meaning that P. Nor is performing an action that is intended to get someone to think this. Instead one must make one’s intention overt. Grice’s way of developing this overtness requirement requires audience-directed intentions: for an agent, on this approach, to mean that P, she must perform a publicly accessible action with the intention of producing in an addressee the belief that P, while further intending that her addressee enter that state at least in part by recognition of her intention. 11 Different types of intended cognitive state and content correspond to different illocutionary forces. Thus an imperatival utterance might be made with the aim of producing an intention to do something; and one might mean P as a conjecture rather than as an assertion by intending to produce in an addressee not a belief but some less committal cognitive state such as tentative acceptance.

In this essay I refine and extend a defense of literary cognitivism (the view that works of literary narrative fiction may serve as sources of knowledge –and not merely belief– in a way that depends crucially on their being fictional) that I and others have provided in earlier publications. Central to that defense is a refinement of Aristotle’s idea of successful dramas as unfolding with “internal necessity”, in light of which I distinguish those forms of narration that show, rather than merely state, that something is so. Literary narrative fiction also often takes the form of a thought experiment, and I distinguish among three aims of such experiment: to make claims (didactic), to exhort to action (directive) and to stimulate inquiry (interrogative). In developing this approach I defend a view of the author of a literary narrative fiction as being in conversation with her readers, and to that end draw upon a view of conversation as driven by an evolving common ground shared among interlocutors. I close with a discussion of some important pitfalls to which narration in literary fiction is prone, and of how in such cases narration’s epistemic value depends primarily upon on our taking the author’s word for how things are.

Slote has argued that empathy plays a crucial role in such speech acts as questions and assertions. After clarifying some of the aims and limitations of speech act theory, providing an account of empathy and its potential epistemic value, and sketching the role that some speech acts play in expressing psychological states, we consider Slote’s argument for the place of empathy in questions and assertions. We show that the most that Slote has established is that some cases of questioning and asserting depend upon on empathetic engagement between speaker and addressee. That, however, is no basis for concluding that empathy plays a crucial role in either of these illocutions.